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Accidental death?
I’ve been declaring that tenure is dying for years on this blog. Now it’s official–as the Chronicle Of Higher Ed’s Robin Wilson notes, “Some time this fall, the U.S. Education Department will publish a report that documents the death of tenure.” Well under 30 percent of the nation’s college professors are tenured or on the tenure track — and that isn’t likely to change.
Meanwhile, studying has died, too. Decades ago, college students studied more than twenty hours each week. Now it’s around fourteen.
The folks who want to see tenure revived argue that there is a link to be made there–that untenured professors can’t teach with the rigor and courage that good pedagogy requires. College courses are thus dumbed down, and good grades can be gotten without much effort. And there is some truth in that. But it’s also true that those with tenure aren’t exactly setting the world on fire with their demanding courses and refusal to inflate grades. Simply restoring tenure won’t make undergraduate education better.
One would think that having very secure employment would enable activity that challenges the immediate power structure at work…in this case, for instance, resisting the inflation of grades…but it doesn’t seem to work that way in practice. There didn’t seem to be any exceptional degree of courage shown by the career civil servants in the two disastrous space shuttle launch decisions, for instance. It’s possible that people with an unusually high need for security tend to self-select for high-security jobs, and high psychological security needs are unlikely to coexist with high levels of personal courage. It also seems likely, in the case of academia, that pressures for conformity during the long PRE-tenure period tend to beat much of any remaining courage out of the individual.
Also, the argument about tenure and teaching quality seems a bit disingenuous, if I’m correct in thinking that the whole tenure-getting process is much more about *research* than about teaching.
Erin, I think you’re right on target- grade inflation has become built-in to all levels of education, from elementary school, through high school, to traditional universities, to on-line universities. A glance at RateMyProfessor.com shows you what most students believe to be most important: (1) how easy the professor is and (2) how “hot” the professor is. When tenured professors try to maintain more rigor in both course content and grading, they often lose enrollment, and this forces them to re-think their approach.
I just did a few quick calculations to see where my own department stands re tenured vs nontenured instructors.
Out of 16 total instructors, 10 of us are tenured or on the tenure track–that is, 62.5 percent. I don’t think my department is all that different in this regard than others at my school.
All of our T/TT faculty teach a 4/4 load, but many of our adjuncts teach less, so basing the calculation solely on the number of instructors doesn’t tell the whole story. More meaningful, I think, is to base the figure on course sections. In my department, in a typical semester, 40 out of 52 actual sections might be taught by T/TT faculty–or 77 percent.
Even this higher figure is a bit misleading, since some of the classes taught by adjuncts are “specialty” classes that would probably be taught by adjuncts even in the AAUP’s ideal world. I’m talking about things like “developmental” (i.e., “bonehead English”) courses that don’t count for credit, and “Methods in Teaching…” courses typically taught by local primary and secondary school teachers (aka “visiting practitioners”).
The most meaningful figure for me would be calculated by considering only those courses that, in my view, should be taught by FT/T/TT faculty: basically, all the writing, literature, mass communication, and theatre courses, but not the developmental and methods courses. Calculated this way, the figure for my department comes to nearly 82 percent.
It’s all got me wondering why my humble institution seems not to be abandoning tenure.
Doubtless part of it is that we don’t have big-time research ambitions. We have no incentive to use cheap adjunct labor to subsidize research faculty, labs, etc. Also, anyone who’s been on a hiring committee here knows how hard it is for us to recruit decent faculty without offering something to compensate for our remote location and low salaries–and that something is the possibility of tenure. Which is to say we have had, and continue to have, pretty strong incentives to retain tenure-track lines.
Just out of curiosity I checked my RateMyProfessors page, and was chagrined to find I have lost my chili pepper. Kids nowadays have no taste.
P.S. The figures provided in Comment #47 after the Chronicle article suggest that tenure is not dying. They suggest that the total number of tenured professors has steadily increased, and that it is only the percentage of T/TT faculty that has declined (presumably in response to the rise of for-profits, increased use of adjuncts at many publics, and God knows what else). Were tenure truly “dying,” wouldn’t one expect a decline in absolute numbers as well as percentages?